Guide

How do you scale a design team?

To scale a design team well, hire for the gaps in it, not more copies of your best person. Map the skills you have, pair people up so those skills spread, run interviews as conversations, and look for people who'll challenge you.

At Blue Prism I built a UX department from nobody to more than 20 designers, researchers and UI developers. My Faster Horses co-hosts, Mark Sutcliffe and Nick Tomlinson, have both worked in teams I've led, and when we recorded this episode they were both building teams of their own. So we compared notes on what had worked, and on a few things that very much hadn't.

Where do you start?

With the team you've already got. When I was hiring for that team, I picked out five skills that mattered for where the business was heading. Then I turned them into a spider diagram, scoring each person out of 100 on each skill.

That made recruitment far easier. I could look at a candidate and ask where they'd sit on the diagram compared with everyone else. It also meant the best person in the interview didn't always get the job. Sometimes the right hire was someone with real potential, or someone with a skill the team was missing entirely. We didn't have a strong illustrator until Nick joined, for example.

Mark adds a second layer: confidence. Someone can have a brilliant skill and no confidence in it at all, and that's a different problem from not having the skill. Map both, and you know whether a person needs training or just encouragement.

How do skills spread through a team?

By sitting people together. It's like playing sport against someone much better than you: your game goes up quickly. Put Nick in a room with someone who wants to get into illustration, and they'll pick up far more than they would from tutorials.

Hire with that in mind, and plan for the team you'll need next year as well as the one you need this week. Priorities change. You might need photography one year and illustration the next. Adaptable people cope with that. People hired for one narrow skill often don't.

Style matters too. If someone's portfolio is full of bright, playful illustration and you hire them to draw data graphs all day, they won't stay long. If you hire an illustrator for their style, let them use it.

How should you interview designers?

Start with an informal chat. My first conversation with anyone is a no-pressure chat about their day and any questions they have about the role. It tells me far more than "walk me through the last five years". As Nick pointed out, it's easy to get more formal later and almost impossible to get friendlier.

Bring juniors into interviews. They can answer questions about the day-to-day better than I can. They also learn how interviews work from the other side of the table, which helped me enormously when I was junior.

Keep the panel small. Nick once had an interview where five or six people sat silently on the call while one person asked the questions. If it takes that many people to judge one candidate, your process is the problem.

Rethink the design task. Asking experienced designers to do free work at home is lazy, and some companies have used candidates' work without hiring them. A live task works better. Jump into a Figma file together and solve a problem side by side. You'll learn how they think and how they collaborate, which matters far more. Career changers are the exception, for example someone moving from graphic design into UX. A short task gives them a chance to prove something their CV can't show yet.

Fit the process to the role. Big companies often use the same questions and forms for every role. A UX designer joining a Bitcoin company doesn't need to understand how the code behind Bitcoin works. Ask about the things the job actually needs.

Who should you hire?

People who challenge you. I'd rather hire someone who pushes me out of my comfort zone than the most polished designer in the room. Nick put it more bluntly: the best hire you can make is someone you're slightly scared will take your job.

Look hard at who's applying, too. If everyone you interview looks like you, you'll design for people like you, and miss the users who don't. Nick was pleased that the pool he recruited from was properly varied, and he still felt there was more work to do on it.

Watch for behaviour that would damage the team's psychological safety, like arrogance or passive aggression. Nerves are different. Interviews are strange, unnatural situations, and being nervous in one tells you very little about how someone will do the job.

What happens after they join?

Help people understand each other quickly. We used trading cards for each team member: what they liked, what they didn't, and what they were good at. Nick's team writes "user manuals" for each person. If Nick has his headphones on, check his manual. It means he's busy, and probably that you should go away. The manuals cover work, such as who to ask about Figma or accessibility, and life outside it, such as films and video games, which is often where the best working relationships start.

Growing the team is only half the job. Keeping it is about how you lead, which I've written about in what good creative leadership looks like.

Building a team right now?

At Designed for Humans I work as a fractional head of design for growing teams. I help with hiring, skills mapping, coaching new leads and training the whole team. Once your team is growing, Design Systems for Humans helps new joiners get up to speed fast, with one documented design system that designers and engineers can both use from their first day.

See how we can work together, or listen to the full episode, S4E1 of Faster Horses, on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.